freq

The word frequency utility.

About

freq counts the words in a document and displays their frequencies.

Here is an example output of the first few results of freq when run over the lyrics to Daft Punk's Technologic:

$ freq technologic.txt | head
      quick: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
technologic: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
      erase: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
        fix: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
      trash: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
     change: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
       mail: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
    upgrade: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
     charge: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇
      point: ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇

NOTE: The example above excludes the word "it"

Mission

Your mission, if you wish to accept it, is to write freq based on the following requirements:

• Read an input file (either specified by command-line arguments or from STDIN)
• Scrape out all words containing only letters in the english alphabet
• For simplicity's sake, convert all scraped words to lowercase
• Count the frequency of each word found
• Display the word followed by a bar representing how many times that word appears in the document

Scraping

Here are some edge cases you may come across:

Input	Expected Result
hello	hello
well-dressed	well dressed
Jim O'Heir	jim oheir
Hello, world!	hello world
<span style="float: right">	span style float right

Bonus

Got time to spare? Try implementing these features:

• Allow the user to specify a minimum word length
• Sort entries by frequency
• Allow the user to specify a max bar length
• If the input file is a web address, fetch the document from the web

Good luck! We're all counting on you.

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by Jordan Scales (http://jordanscales.com). Stevens Open Source Society, Fall 2013.